Gov. Gregoire unlevels the playing field against job-creating new media companies

Apparently Governor Gregoire has an affinity for news on dead trees. Today it was reported that there is now a 40% tax break for newspaper companies. If the idea is to “save journalism”, why should it matter what vehicle it is delivered by. Of all states, it’s particularly curious when you have perhaps more online journalism jobs that have been created over the last 15 years in Washington than anywhere but New York and the Bay Area. It goes back to MSNBC, Sidewalk and Starwave in the early days of the web to countless others more recently such as Crosscut.com and numerous other hyperlocal news and blog sites from West Seattle to Ballard to Spokane.

As Danny Sullivan reported, it’s not 100% certain that online-only publications aren’t eligible but it certainly looks that way. The host of this blog, the P-I, certainly should be eligible for the same tax break if they are going to be doled out.

* WA Gov approves newspaper tax break at Politico which mentions stories at the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, though actually these were simply links to stories elsewhere (HuffPo went with Business Insider; Drudge with the Seattle Times, both stories below).
* Obnoxious Newspaper Bailout Begins at Business Insider is the story that the Huffington Post linked to, which links to a Seattle Times story about the bill, noting that it was a tiny seven-line item apparently buried in the local news section.
* Washington State Bails Out Media: Newspapers Get Tax Cut is from Newsbusters and points at the same Seattle Times story.
* Wash. gov OKs tax cut for newspapers is the aforementioned Seattle Times story, which is indeed tiny and boils down to this key sentence: “The new law gives newspaper printers and publishers a 40 percent cut in the state’s main business tax.”
* Washington papers paid dearly for tax cut from Reflections Of A Newsosaur notes an estimate that the break will save papers $8 million through 2015, enough for 15 “fully loaded” reporting jobs assuming the money is spent on that. It could be used for whatever the papers want.

Alan Mutter (Reflections of a Newsosaur) goes further to outline the deal with the devil that the Washington newspaper companies made for what may save as few as 15 jobs statewide.

In lobbying aggressively for the tax break, the publishers sacrificed their moral authority to challenge favoritism, fiscal imprudence and self-dealing on the part of the state government and the dozens of political figures who supported the measure.